"No," Vaal says, laughing.

"Vaal is not a road," Chork says. He adds something that's probably teasing, that Vaal reacts to with mock anger.

Griffie points at a tree. "That's a tree?" Ey picks a leaf. "Is from tree?"

Leaves are from trees - this bundle of firewood over here is also from a tree - these peppers and berries are from plants that are not trees - the berries are from those mountains over there, actually - they can riff on things being from other things for a while if not stopped.

Griffie will point to eir book and say "That's a?".

Book!

Griffie points at eir book. "Book is from Griffie." Ey gestures at the surrounding area. "Book is from Vaal? Book is from Chork?"

Chork shrugs.

Vaal gestures for Griffie to wait for a second and fetches a notebook from inside. It does not seem to contain anything sensitive, from how casual he is about showing Griffie.

But does it have text in the local script, that's the question.

If so, Griffie reads out loud a sentence from eir notebook, indicating each word as ey reads it. "That's a? Griffie mmmm book?"

"Reading. Griffie reads from the book." Vaal picks a random page and reads a couple lines out loud.

"Vaal reads from the book!!"

Griffie will copy Vaal's writing closely and then make notes beneath it in another script. Once Vaal stops reading, ey will start pointing at eir copied letters, and saying "That's a" followed by the sound ey thinks the letter makes.

Vaal's notebook is incredibly repetitive, almost nothing but amounts of banana products sold at places on dates for amounts of rupees. Occasionally the monotony is broken by a record of the banana products he picked up before a trip. He can clarify letters for Griffie.

Knowing the alphabet is good. Repetitive is also good. Griffie is going to go try to write down in this language the words ey wrote down phonetic transcriptions of and solicit spelling corrections.

Vaal can correct Griffie's spelling too.

...Would Griffie maybe like to see examples of his banana products?

Yeah!

Vaal has fresh bananas and banana chips and banana jam, and can talk about where bananas come from (trees in the jungle to the southeast) and how they're made into jam and chips.

This is helpful and informative and Griffie will take notes. And get more words that aren't names of objects.

Since Griffie's taking notes and can presumably go over them later to actually memorize things, Vaal will just keep going with the vocabulary. These are hands. These are eyes. This is his bow which belongs to him - that's Griffie's notebook which belongs to Griffie - this is Vaal's notebook which belongs to Vaal - these are Vaal's bananas which belong to Vaal, and if Griffie had some rupees, Vaal could sell Griffie the bananas for the rupees, and then the rupees would be Vaal's and the bananas would be Griffie's...

The green crystal looks kind of like Vaal's rupee, is it a rupee? What is a copper coin?

The green crystal is one rupee - these other colors are worth different numbers of green rupees - grass is green, this other rupee is blue, the sky is blue, one blue rupee is one-two-three-four-five green rupees - Vaal has one-two-three-four-five six-seven-eight-nine-ten fingers, see - this red one is worth twenty, or four times five, or two times ten, or ten plus ten - and at any rate Vaal isn't selling anything for one rupee right now. The copper thing is... an ingot? A really small ingot? A work of art? ...at any rate it's metal, like this buckle, which is also metal.

Oooh, math words. Also, since when do people do small change in crystals, if a crystal doesn't even buy a single banana then why do people bother carrying them around to use as a unit of exchange. Ey hasn't seen anything made out of crystals here, has ey?

Eir notes say that ten plus ten is twenty. Twenty blank-space ten is ten. Two times ten is twenty. Twenty blank-space ten is two. Ey points at the blank spaces. "This is?".

There don't seem to be crystal things right here in this stable... probably. The weird probably man-made structure with glowy orange parts up on the cliff nearby might be partly crystal? Probably not, it's probably just a metal thing.

"Twenty minus ten is ten. Twenty divided by ten is two."

One minus one and one minus two and one divided by two are?

Vaal has heard of negative numbers and fractions and can totally explain them. And the notation used for algebra, and exponents, and Griffie might want to stop him at some point.

Griffie's coworker is a wizard and ey knows more math than you might expect, but yeah, honestly the main thing ey wanted from this exercise was the word 'negative'. …also the word 'positive', that'd be nice too.

Vaal is slightly hard to maneuver into that one. He seems to think non-negative numbers are unmarked and default. But he does eventually suggest a word, with a thoughtful frown like he's trying to figure out why Griffie wants to know this of all things.